


The Root Of Our Fears

by orphan_account



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Brian Banner's A+ Parenting, Bruce Banner Needs a Hug, Discussion of Abortion, M/M, Mpreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-04 18:08:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5343518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce shakes his head. “We weren’t poor.”</p><p>He can feel Steve staring at him, but doesn’t dare look back.</p><p>“There’s more than one way to be poor.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Root Of Our Fears

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

Bruce rises from his folded lotus.

“No,” he says.

Tony isn’t looking at him. Bruce suspects he can’t. He wouldn’t be able to, if their situations were reversed.

“Because it’s no longer an issue?”

“Because it won’t be.”

Tony’s hands clench into fists and Bruce can _smell_ the rage he’s desperately trying to bury. It’s no use, he thinks, rage doesn’t take kindly to being swallowed like a bitter pill. It’ll force its way up your throat one way or another. He should know. 

“You’re not going to let me have a say in this?”

Bruce looks at Tony, his own temper sparking, just a little. 

“Should I?”

Tony walks towards the window, sticking his shaking hands in his pockets. Bruce turns away, unwilling to observe Tony Stark lit up like a golden idol in the setting sun. 

Bruce rolls up his yoga mat and slips on a too-large t-shirt that hides nothing now. The only person he ever cared to hide his condition from apparently already knows. He’s almost certain Fury has known for weeks. There’s no point in hiding. Except, of course, the obvious.

“You should have told me you were capable of having children,” Tony says, and it sounds like an accusation. 

“You made an assumption,” Bruce says evenly. “It’s not my job to monitor what you have or haven’t sensed for yourself.”

“I thought I knew you.”

Bruce closes his eyes.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “Me too.”

Bruce leaves.

**

Steve comes and finds him just after midnight. Bruce is sitting on the roof, looking out over the skyline, trying to imagine what their sleepless city must look like from above. He’s flown over New York, of course, but never at night and not in recent years. An aurora borealis of twinkling, chaotic stars, he thinks. It would be beautiful.

Steve doesn’t say anything at first, just replaces the empty pot of herbal tea with a fresh one and pours himself a cup.

“You don’t even like tea,” Bruce accuses gently.

“I like this tea.” No sugar, Bruce notices. A puritan. Bruce wonders if he picked it up from Peggy. Steve takes an incongruously delicate sip and his shoulders relax a little. “My mother made it for me when I was a kid. When I smell it, I think of her.”

“My mother never made tea,” Bruce says. “Just coffee. Hot chocolate if I’d been good.”

“We could never afford chocolate.”

Bruce ducks his head, rueful for the poor lost boy, even as he admires the man he’s become. 

“From what I hear you could have used it.”

Steve chuckles. “Not exactly the kind of food to put hair on your chest, but yeah, I could have done with a bit of fattening up.” Steve pauses, takes a long sip. “You too, I hear.”

“You read my file?” Bruce asks, falsely casual. 

“You’re a part of my team,” Steve says. A yes, but a kind one.

Bruce shakes his head. “We weren’t poor.”

He can feel Steve staring at him, but he doesn’t dare look back.

“There’s more than one type of poor.”

Steve places a hand on his shoulder, squeezing. He doesn’t try to slip his arm around Bruce’s shoulder, perhaps sensing that the gesture would not be welcome. 

“Fury’s asked me to take you off active duty.”

Bruce takes a long sip to disguise the instinctive pursing of his lips. He’s been expecting this, but it still smarts. 

“It shouldn’t be an issue much longer,” Bruce tells him, realising too late that the subject matter isn’t really one that lends itself to reassurances. 

Steve says nothing for a long moment, perhaps gathering his thoughts. Bruce is morbidly curious if he’s about to find out that Captain America is secretly some kind of pro-choice alpha bigot. He doubts it. Steve has never made a habit of infringing on the personal freedoms of others. It’s kind of his thing. 

“Whatever you do, I’ll support you. The team will support you. Just… be sure,” he says finally.

Bruce doesn’t know what to think. He settles for thinking nothing at all. 

Steve squeezes his shoulder again and mercifully doesn’t say anything else. They finish the pot of tea together before going back inside. 

**

When Bruce is five years old, his mother takes him by the arm in a bruising grip and tells him to hide. Her hair tickles his face. Her lip is sweaty and her eyes are wide with something false. It’s the voice she uses when she’s trying to trick him. High and joyless, pretending to be happy. He doesn’t like it. He tells her so. She looks like her heart is breaking and Bruce feels bad enough to go where she’s leading him, to not protest of ask questions as she puts him in the linen closet and closes the door behind him. 

He has a toy car in his pocket that he races up and down the door, imaging a vertical freeway, something futuristic and cool with lots of flashing lights, upside down skyscrapers, and stars lighting up the sky even during the day time. There are noises outside that he tries not to pay attention to, yelling, loud footsteps, crashes and bangs. His mother screams. The car clutters to the floor. Bruce presses his hands over his ears and crouches down low to the floor. He rocks backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, as the screaming goes on and on (and on). 

Curled up in the dark, he watches motes of dust float in the light coming through the crack in the door. Suspended above the earth, floating through the air, weightless and free, never alone. Bruce thinks it would be nice, to be free, to go where the wind took you. The house it silent and Bruce’s stomach clutches like it’s hungry, grasping for something indefinable. Bruce waits for a long time. No one finds him. 

**

Scott Lang greets him at the door to his personal quarters with a cheery wave and a completely unironic, “Hey dude!”

Bruce returns the smile slightly less enthusiastically. “Hi?”

“I’m your new roommate!”

Bruce frowns. 

“Roommate,” he repeats dubiously. 

“You bet. Which room’s the spare? I’ll leave you with the master digs, don’t worry my friend.”

Scott dumps his duffle on the coffee table and starts hunting through rooms. Bruce’s lodgings at the Avengers facility are too spacious by half. Under normal circumstances he would have welcomed a roommate. Somehow he gets the feeling these aren’t normal circumstances. 

“I’m not actually using the master,” Bruce says, trying not to stare as Scott ducks from room to room with wide, childlike eyes, flipping through the unlimited channel selection of Stark Premium Cable like he’s never seen a television before. 

“Dude,” Scott says when he discovers the movie library. “You have Punisher.”

“Uh,” Bruce says. “Yep.”

Scott points at him. “We need to watch Punisher.”

Bruce scratches the back of his head. 

“Look, I don’t want to sound rude, but what are you doing here? No one told me I was getting a roommate. I thought all Avengers have their own rooms?”

“Oh we do. Mine’s still being repaired.” Scott looks sheepish when he catches Brice’s raised eyebrow. “My fault. Turns out I kicked Falcon through the wrong load-bearing pillar.”

“So this is temporary,” Bruce says, relaxing a little. Maybe he overreacted. There’s no way Fury would send the greenest new recruit to spy on him. 

“Yep. Wanna play Halo?”

Bruce does, it turns out, want to play Halo. More accurately, it seems he kind of needs to play Halo. There’s only so much Tai Chi and meditation a man can do before he’s forced to find new avenues to deal with his aggression. Killing aliens and running people over with tanks turns out to be strangely therapeutic. 

Bruce leaves to check on a couple of experiments and when he returns the door to the master bedroom is closed and Bruce can just make out snoring from behind the wood. 

Bruce smiles to himself. Maybe this whole roommate thing won’t be so bad.

**

Scott is spying on him, and he’s so horribly, painfully obvious about it, that Bruce knows there’s no way Fury is responsible. He’d never sign off on such amateur hour bullshit. Scott might be able to shrink himself small enough to stand on the head of a pin, but he’s about the most obvious prick Bruce has ever met. 

What you need to understand about Bruce is that he’s been on the run for years. At this point, his hypervigilance is so advanced that he’s managed to catch Natasha slinking through the shadows more times than he cares to admit. Bruce notices things. Things like tiny little people jumping from his pants leg, up on tablecloths, and hiding behind his water glass at lunch. Small is not invisible.

Bruce ‘accidentally’ tosses Scott out a fourth floor window with his coffee cup and pretends not to notice the very obvious sound of cracking concrete as he hits the ground. Then he walks into the briefing room where the other Avengers are already assembled, and takes his seat calmly. Tony’s eyes linger on his shoulder, a slight frown between his brows. 

Bingo, Bruce thinks. 

Steve sends Bruce a slightly awkward smile after he orders the team to move out, but Bruce waves it away. Wanda, Sam and Rhodey stand and follow Steve down to the hangar. Natasha stays behind to run the rest of the team- minus Bruce- through drills, and Bruce slips out the door when no one is looking. He knows now that Tony is watching him. He can guess why. It makes him angry to think that he’s being monitored by Tony Stark of all people, but he’s curious enough about Tony’s angle to let it slide. For the moment, anyway. 

**

There’s been an attack on the facility, that much is clear. People are screaming and he can hear emergency response units moving down below. There is dust and broken glass everywhere. A piece of the celling has come down on his leg, pinning him to the floor. There’s a woman lying next to him whose entire lower body is pinned. Her pelvis is crushed and her spine has been badly damaged. Bruce knows because it’s the only possible reason she’s not screaming. Bruce would be screaming too, if he wasn’t concentrating so hard on not turning green. Not only would he definitely kill the woman beside him, but he would also kill what’s growing inside of him. 

The thing is, Bruce would be a horrible father. He really would. But that doesn’t mean he wants the choice taken away from him. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to give the life inside of him time to grow and change. Just because Bruce can’t be a father, doesn’t mean the kid inside of him shouldn’t have a life. He understands why women have abortions. If he didn’t think he could see this thing through for nine months, he would too. But he does, and he will. Because Bruce knows what he wants now. He just wishes it hadn’t taken getting his leg crushed to realise it. 

The woman reaches for his hand and he holds it tight, whispering that she’s going to be alright. She’s completely pinned, but that shouldn’t be an issue as long as the team finds them quickly. The weight of the concrete is keeping pressure on her injuries so there’s minimal blood loss, and most importantly, she’s coherent. Her eyes are a little glassy, but still sharp. Her breathing is short and panicked, but Bruce guides her through a test and determines that her lungs are clear. She will most likely never walk again, but she has a good chance of survival if they’re found within the next thirty minutes. After that, things get a little trickier for the both of them.

Bruce’s leg is crushed. He’ll be in a cast for most of his pregnancy and will have to go through physical therapy, but he’ll live. 

The Vision finds them a few minutes later and lifts the column away. Paramedics swarm around them, and Bruce is forced to let go of the woman’s hand as she’s wheeled into the back of the closest ambulance.

Bruce is mounted on his own stretcher, and Black Widow sprints around the corner just as he’s being strapped in. 

“Move, move, move!” She shouts.

There’s an explosion and Bruce ducks and rolls instinctively, overturning his gurney and using it as a shield from the debris. 

Clint hauls him to his feet. “You alright doc?” 

“Fine,” Bruce coughs, focusing on slowing his heartrate and not passing out from the pain in his leg. Clint takes his weight, and when it becomes obvious Bruce can’t walk, swings him into his arms. Bruce grits his teeth at the tight grip on his mangled leg, and Clint tells him to hang on before he starts running. 

They don’t get far before Bruce passes out from the pain. The last thing he sees before passing out it a glimmer of red and gold shooting across the sky like a comet. 

**

Bruce wakes up in the infirmary to find Tony Stark passed out in the chair beside his bed.

“Why is he here?” Bruce asks the shadows.

Natasha steps into the light and Bruce tries not to smile at the practiced smoothness of her perfect face. 

“For the same reason you are.” Natasha flicks her eyes over Tony, from his rumpled clothes, to this three day beard, to the places where his hair sticks up in all directions. “He had an accident. Got himself hurt.”

Bruce raises an eyebrow.

“I don’t see any bandages.”

Natasha smirks. 

“Not the kind of accident I was referring to.” 

Bruce rubs a hand over his belly, firm as ripe fruit and ever so slightly raised. 

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” Brice says, semi-conversational.

“But you did.”

Bruce’s hand spasms over his belly. “He hurt me too.”

“Yes,” Natasha agrees. “But he’s Tony Stark. He always hurts the people he loves.”

“I don’t want to be one of them,” Bruce admits.

Natasha bends down to kiss his cheek, her alpha musk lingering, making him wish he’d taken her to bed instead. “Then don’t be.”

Bruce watches her go, and only notices Tony’s eyes on him when he catches the cat-like gleam of their reflection in the glass. 

“You’re frightened of me,” Tony says, like he’s realised something important, a puzzle piece he was missing. 

It should sound insane. Bruce Banner, part-time rage monster, part-time nuclear physicist scared of Tony Stark. Instead, it just sounds true. 

“You’re frightening,” Bruce admits. 

“Because I’m cruel, selfish, callous?”

Tony’s defensiveness is an ugly, ugly thing. 

“Because you’re careless.”

Tony falls silent.

“Because you take and you take until there’s nothing left, no matter what it costs the people around you.” Bruce traces the dip of his belly button. “You took something from me Tony. Something I’ll never get back. Something I hadn’t realised was even mine to give.”

Tony growls. “I didn’t know Bruce! You didn’t tell me.”

Bruce glares at him, abruptly sick of his attitude, his accusations, his spite.

“I didn’t know, okay? I thought…” Bruce cuts himself off.

Tony is silent for a moment. “What?” 

“I can’t have kids Tony.”

Tony looks at his stomach.

“But you’re—”

“Yes. I am. But I can’t have kids.” Bruce smiles, small and rueful. “I didn’t know either, you see.”

“I had an accident when I was younger. The doctor told me it was impossible that I would ever conceive. My mother would have cried if she’d been alive to see it. My father would have been proud that someone else had finished the job for him.”

Bruce didn’t dare look up to see what Tony’s expression looked like, but he still felt it like a brand on his cheek. 

“I’ve never wanted to be a father Tony.”

Tony snorts, shakes his head. “Me neither.”

Bruce smiles, just a little. “The pair of us.”

“Yeah,” Tony agrees. 

They sit in silence until the doctor comes around to up his dose of morphine and he find himself drifting off. He feels the soft drag of finger through his hair before the world fades away and he drops into a dreamless sleep.

**

Three weeks later, Bruce is laid up in bed reading a book when there’s a knock on the door and Scott practically falls all over himself to answer it. Scott has been shamelessly grovelling ever since Bruce let it slip that he not only knew, but did not appreciate Scott’s attempts at stealth-monitoring his health and wellbeing. Now, if Bruce even looks like he might, at some point in the near future, be ever so slightly uncomfortable, Scott will go to any and all lengths to ensure he is as provided for as humanly possible. 

Bruce tries not to flinch when he sees that it’s Tony at the door, and instead gives the signal for Scott to let him in. Tony strolls over, hands in the pockets of what looks like another ridiculously expensive suit, rose-tinted glasses balanced on the end of his nose. 

Bruce raises and eyebrow. “Going somewhere.”

“Conference in Milan. You’d be amazed at the research coming out the clean energy sector. Seriously, you’d have a field day with that crowd. You should come. Next time, I mean.”

Tony’s very deliberately not looking at him, and despite the way he’s obviously trying to lock Bruce into a future that is somewhat by his side, Bruce is reluctantly charmed by the suggestion. He hasn’t been to a research conference in a very long time. 

“Sounds good,” he says.

Tony almost trips over where he’s standing and Bruce has to stifle a grin.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

They smile at each other until it becomes kind of awkward and they have to look away. Tony clears his throat and his eyes, as they invariably do, dart down to his stomach.

“Is everything… alright?”

Bruce shrugs. “It’s still early so there’s not much activity. Really just feels like being kind of full actually.”

“Yeah, but is everything alright?”

“Everything’s fine Tony. I had my check up three days ago.”

Tony breathes out a sigh of relief and Bruce knows immediately that he doesn’t want to go another day punishing this man. 

“Come here,” he says.

Tony looks adorably befuddled, “say what?”

“Come here.”

This time Tony comes as requested, kneeling tentatively beside the bed, going with the motion of Bruce’s guiding hands as he’s pulled down to hover over the top of him. Bruce cups his faces, traces his fingers over his cheekbones.

“You’re not so scary,” Bruce whispers.

“And you are entirely too scary by half,” Tony says, kissing the bridge of his nose, his cheeks, his forehead, his jaw, his eyelids. 

Bruce grabs his chin, forcing their eyes together. “You won’t run away?”

“Never,” Tony promises, and despite all evidence to the contrary, Bruce believes him.

Tony guides him into a kiss that tastes like sunlight and feels like redemption. Up above the stars twinkle even in the day time, and a little toy car sits abandoned under a loose floor board in a linen closet. In spite of it all, life goes on.


End file.
